Category Archives: numbers

The Home Office has now published its Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals, Great Britain for 2018. Here is VERO’s selective summary of the numbers and species, alongside those of 2017 (which seem to have been slightly revised since they were published last year), with some comments to follow:

Species

Number used in 2018

Number used in 2017

Mice

2,568,197

2,781,685

Fish

454,340

514,059

Rats

177,904

241,544

Domestic fowl

141,069

125,280

Sheep

53,672

47,499

Guinea Pigs

6,445

22,560

Horses

10,424

10,600

Rabbits

11,159

10,362

Dogs

4,481

3,847

Non-human primates

3,127

2,962

Other species

89,099

28,975

Total:

3,519,917

3,789,373

Direction of travel: You may notice that there has been a fall of about 7% in the numbers since last year. You certainly will notice it if you read the Home Office report itself, since the point is made twice in the first four pages, as is also the fact that this is the lowest number since 2007 (a fact highlighted in attractive purple each time). There has been a fall in each of the last three years, so perhaps it is now possible to detect a real and very welcome downwards trend after years of more or less steady increase. Still, there is a long way to go (to go back), for even this 2018 number is about 34% greater than the number recorded in 2001.

Particular species: There has been a fall in numbers for most species, but you’ll see that two of those which have special protection under the 1986 Act have not enjoyed a share in it: dogs and non-human primates. The sad thing is that these animals are mainly used in so-called ‘regulatory testing’, the most patently unpleasant category of research, and one which has always had the worst severity ratings: this year, 12.5% of the procedures were classified as ‘severe’ (i.e. the top pain rating), compared to about 2% of the procedures for ‘basic’ research. Dogs (which mercifully don’t appear in the ‘severe’ category this year) and primates are used primarily for the testing of human and veterinary ‘medical products’, by the method called ‘repeated dose toxicity’. Other animals in this category of research may be required to test industrial chemicals, biocides, animal feeds (this, we’re told, is “for the safety of target animals, workers and environment”, so God knows what these feeds contain), and an unspecified ‘other’, in which again both dogs and primates feature.

The testing methods used on the less-protected animals still include the notorious LD50 and LC50 tests, as well as unspecified ‘other lethal methods’. That word ‘other’ acquires a sinister character in these records, but “other lethal” is an illogical category anyway, since all or nearly all this laboriously counted work is lethal in the not-so-long run for the animals, even when they are not killed by the product itself.

The 10,000 or so procedures on horses recorded in this Home Office report (up 19% since 2009) appear likewise mainly in this ‘regulatory’ category, although in fact the horses are being used not for testing but for the routine production of blood derivatives. You can see some of the uses to which this blood is put being advertised on the web-site of TCS Biosciences (“your partner: For Life”). In the USA, these uses include the keeping of farmed sows regularly in heat, by means of ‘Pregnant Mare Serum Gonadotropin’. I mention this as one stray and disgusting instance of the way that animal research serves and therefore promotes high-tech animal farming. Scientists often compare the animal costs of their work favourably with the suffering and death-rate in agriculture; it’s a defence they have been using ever since they discovered that vivisection required defending. But the distinction is altogether disingenuous: farming as now practised would not have been possible, let alone profitable, without the steady support of laboratory science.

Democracy at work, or not: The 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act requires the Home Office to “publish and lay before Parliament” these annual statistics in order that the people, acting through their representatives, can knowingly assent to them. In practice this assent is assumed rather than annually petitioned for. Some challenges there are, of course. ‘Early Day Motions’ may be tabled, in which MPs express their dissent: at present there is one such (EDM 66), signed by 63 MPs and calling for “a thorough, properly moderated public scientific debate on the misleading and costly practice of trying to apply results from animal experiments to human patients.” Or questions may be put to ministers; for instance, on 3 September 2018, the excellent (and vegan) MP Kerry McCarthy asked about the increased use of horses for blood collection, as mentioned above. Much more rarely there are dedicated debates, the most recent of them on 5 February 2013, held in Westminster Hall and simply titled ‘Animal Experiments’.

But the lack of a proper departmental home and a dedicated minister for all animal subjects means that no great momentum is ever created out of these haphazard initiatives. Animal research alone is dealt with in fragments by at least three major departments: the Home Office, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and the Department of Health and Social Care. It’s a situation tragi-comically reflected in the name of the Home Office agency responsible for putting out these annual statistics: the Fire, Licensing and Public Order Analysis Unit.

In the absence of sustained parliamentary fuss, these statistics and the exploitation of animals which they dimly shadow have come to seem like a sort of natural or at least sociological phenomenon, rather than a deliberate moral choice. The Home Office report itself sets the style for that way of viewing them. Surveying the variations in numbers over the years since 1987, it provides this helpful explanation: “The number of procedures carried out on living animals is determined by several factors, including the focus of scientific and medical endeavours, the economic climate and global trends in new technologies or fields of research.” No one’s really in charge, then; we’re all just bystanders. And it then becomes reasonable to take the view noted in this blog when last year’s statistics were published: that is, that big numbers are actually an indication that all’s well in UK life-science research – or, as one promotional organisation has said this time round, “Year-to-year numbers are thus best seen as a reflection of the current health of UK bioscience investment and will fluctuate year-on-year.”

Fluctuate! We’re a very long way here not just from the pains of the animals whom these statistics are nominally about, but also from the moral purpose clearly though imperfectly put into political effect in the 1986 Act and the 2010 European Directive. For them, downward was the desired and proper direction, not an accident of economics.

Well, it’s true that counting animals is not the essence of animal rights, but falling numbers are emphatically better than rising numbers, and if the present trend in that direction is to be kept going we need to remind our political representatives (even at this least propitious of political times) to keep the subject controversial. Many MPs really do mind about animals, and even more of them know that their constituents do. To illustrate as much, here is an MP speaking about animal research back in 1971, at the high point of vivisection numbers in the UK, just preceding the long fall towards 2001: “I know that the object is to preserve human life; but it does make me wonder whether a human race that can take such morally degrading practices in its stride is really worth preserving.”

Yes, that’s the proper context in which to view and debate these annual statistics.

Unfortunately I don’t know who the last-mentioned MP was: he or she is quoted without name or reference by Desmond Morris in his book Intimate Behaviour (Jonathan Cape, 1971), p.183.

The photograph of a rhesus macaque monkey in Oxford University’s Biomedical Sciences Building, probably himself long since an annual statistic, is used by courtesy of the university’s Public Affairs Office.

The statistics for Oxford University’s animal research in 2018 have now been made public on the University’s web-site. Here is VERO’s summary, showing the numbers for each species (with 2017 for comparison), and then the severity of the ‘procedures’ involved. A few comments follow the two tables.

Total number of experimental procedures, by species:

Species

Number in 2017

Number in 2018

Mice

229,640

208,057

Fishes

3,852

8002

Rats

2,599

2,913

Junglefowl

21

291

Frogs

155

89

Guinea Pigs

80

81

Badgers

39

64

Pigs

5

20

Ferrets

29

24

Non-Human Primates

7

10

Rabbits

2

0

Total:

236,429

219,551

Severity of procedures (for those species where moderate or above was recorded):

Species

Severe

Moderate

Mild

Sub-threshold

Non-recovery

Mice

1,889

35,903

49,730

117,743

2,792

Fishes

298

1,236

5,127

1,211

130

Rats

37

622

427

1,150

677

Ferrets

0

9

0

0

15

Non-Human Primates

0

9

1

0

0

The total number: 219,551 represents a fall of just over 7% on last year’s total. This is welcome, of course, but unfortunately it can’t be taken as part of a trend. Last year’s number had shown a rise of 8.5% on 2016. Like the value of investments (and one might pursue other similarities), these numbers may go down as well as up, but the clear trend since the completion of the new laboratory has been upward. The number for 2007, which was the last complete year before the laboratory opened for business, was 155,901.

Animals killed without experiments: No number has yet been published for these animals in 2018. Perhaps it won’t ever be given, since a number was provided for 2017 last year, and for some reason the law only requires such animals to be counted in every fifth year. But it’s a very important number, and ought always to be included in the returns. That’s partly because the number is to some extent an index to the efficiency of a laboratory, unpleasant as that word ‘efficiency’ is in this context. But also, the need to do and publish this count is a helpful corrective to the assumption, which the 1986 Act otherwise makes and therefore encourages, that killing an animal is not in itself a significant wrong. That assumption has been frequently noticed in other parts of this blog. It’s not one we humans make for ourselves; I can’t think of any sound reason for making it in the case of other animals.

Science or PR: Last year’s commentary in this blog on the annual Oxford numbers included a critical appreciation of the University’s animal-research web-pages, or at least of the main page, which is titled ‘Research Using Animals: an Overview’. Very little on that page has changed since then, except the just-published numbers. However, the sentence which introduces numbers is new, and here it is:

Figures for 2018 show numbers of animals ‘on procedure’, as declared to the Home Office using their five categories for the severity of the procedure.

This short and functional statement manages to fit in two plain errors. The first error is to speak of numbers of animals rather than numbers of ‘procedures’. The statistics submitted to the Home Office, or separately published as here, are always a count-up of procedures and not of animals. True, this makes very little difference in practice (although the two numbers can differ if, for instance, an animal is re-used in a new research project); it may therefore seem a pedantic distinction, especially since neither way of counting really tells us very much, as this blog has often enough shown. But the point is that nobody who has had anything to do with conducting or reporting the research would make such a mistake. When Cruelty Free International rather carelessly made a similar mistake a few years back, Speaking of Research (a scientists’ pressure-group promoting animal research) called it “a rookie mistake for an organisation which claims to be an authority on the issue”. Oxford University surely is an authority on its own research. How then does it let through a mistake like this?

The second error shows a similar confusion. The animals in the count are said to be “on procedure”, a professional-sounding term perhaps borrowed from lower down on the ‘Overview’ page where it refers to non-human primates undergoing brain research. But the term means ‘research unfinished’, whereas the annual count is precisely of completed research. It used once to be a count of proposed and accepted procedures (the change, a sensible one, came in 2014), but it was never a count of procedures under way at time of counting.

Again, it may not seem to matter much, though in this case it would be a very awkward way of doing things. But the confusion in both cases makes clear that these annual numbers are being introduced by someone who knows only the jargon of the subject, and also that nobody with better knowledge is being asked to check what’s written, or cares to do so on their own initiative. In short, it’s simply a PR job, and not a very good one.

Last year’s commentary showed that the whole ‘Overview’ text evidences the same sort of amateur authorship. Presumably we can treat the annual numbers themselves as reliable, but there’s no reason to accept as true or authoritative anything else said on the animal research web-pages. This isn’t university science speaking (or even bothering to have read). We needn’t spend any more time on it ourselves, then.

By way of confirmation that Christmas approaches, the facebook page of Understanding Animal Research (UAR) is counting down the days with a festive sequence based on ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’: “On the nth day of Christmas researchers sent to me …” It’s true that the well-worn carol really refers to the days after the 25th, but this is light-hearted entertainment after all, and it helps to show that animal research can be fun – or promoting it can be, anyway! So with much jingling and stardust, a rat in a lab coat stands by a Christmas tree and gratefully receives such amusingly pertinent things as “approval by ethics committee” (the “partridge in a pear tree” equivalent) or “six knockout mice”.

Tearing oneself away from this merriment, there are more straight-faced things happening in the profession at this time of year. There’s the annual awards ceremony associated with UAR’s Concordat on Openness on Animal Research, and although that’s a sort of school prize-day that interests only the school itself, the Concordat’s annual report is published to coincide with it, and this document genuinely is a sign of the times worth attending to. Then, in the wider world of animal research, there’s the annual report from the Animals in Science Regulation Unit (ASRU), the organisation responsible for licensing, inspecting, and policing such work. This report too has just been published, though it actually reviews 2017. And more portentous still, a parliamentary ‘statutory instrument’ has now been issued which will disjoin the UK’s law – the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 – from that of the EU, with which it has been harmonized since 2012.

VERO has perused all these and some other newly published texts, and here is a view of what they amount to. Do your best to attend: this jungle of words is where millions of animals have to live, however briefly.

First, a stray and very specific publication from the Home Office, short-titled Additional Statistics. Here, we are finally told how many animals die in labs without ever appearing in the statistics of ‘procedures’. These are the animals (mostly mice, but also rats and fish, plus an undeclared 2% “other”) who have been bred but found unnecessary or unsuitable and therefore killed, or been used for tissue collection only, or been kept as ‘sentinels’ to test for infections circulating in the neighbourhood. Or they have simply died by mistake (i.e. human mistake: see the ASRU report below). The total of these animals in 2017 was 1,810,091. Therefore the total of all animals used in Great Britain’s laboratories last year, as the Home Office now declares, was about 5.53 million.

This is surely a very important addition to the statistics hitherto provided. The law, and accordingly perhaps the scientists themselves, don’t rate death very highly as a harm, compared to suffering. Death is therefore not classified as a ‘procedure’ even when (as is usually the case) it’s deliberately inflicted, nor does it require a licensed person to effect it, and it hasn’t until now been made part of any official count. But a public survey carried out by Ipsos MORI in 2013 showed very clearly that non-professionals think differently: “they saw death as the most serious harm which could be done to an animal . . . participants felt the public should know more about how many animals are killed.” That now they do know more is the result of the European Directive 2010/63 which governs animal research in all member states, and which requires this information to be issued once very five years. (The Directive was transposed into UK law in 2012, so 2017 is the first result of this provision). Why every five years, I don’t know. Nor does anyone seem to know (a more important uncertainty) whether the requirement will lapse in the UK after Brexit, assuming that Brexit occurs.

That brings us to another recent publication, The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, which specifies the alterations to UK law which will become necessary “on exit day”. Despite the resoundingly bureaucratic title, these alterations are surprisingly few; they take up hardly half a page of detailed adjustments. And indeed the much longer Explanatory Memorandum which accompanies them states emphatically that the changes “are the minimum necessary”. A convincing illustration: under the heading ‘Matters of special interest to the Committees on the UK’s exit from the European Union’ (a warning of difficulty or controversy) is the statement “None”.

Of course, nothing is said in the Memorandum, or can be said yet, about the pressures which may come when UK bioscience has to make a more solitary effort to “retain competitiveness in global markets” (as the Head of ASRU dismally expresses it). But in the course of emphasizing that all existing standards of welfare and supervision will be maintained, the Explanatory Memorandum does provide one very specific and most important reassurance: “Implementation of the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement) will contribute to the final goal of full replacement of procedures on live animals for scientific and educational purposes as soon as it is scientifically possible to do so, which was an aim enshrined in Directive 2010/63/EU.”

Admittedly the ambition thus re-stated commits nobody to anything, and it leaves to scientists the decision as to when full replacement has become possible, but as far as I have seen it’s the first time that this goal has been formally re-stated, perhaps even been mentioned anywhere in animal research circles, since its original declaration in the Directive. Yet it’s what really makes sense of the 3Rs. They’re not there just to discourage waste of life and pain, important as that purpose is. Still less are they a sort of passport or alibi for research which might otherwise be suspected of moral frivolity or negligence. The 3Rs should act as a constant and uncomfortable reminder that this sort of work is due to end.

That is not at all the impression of them which one gets from the Concordat’s literature or activities. There they seem to be regarded more as a sort of correct dress for scientists when appearing before the public – for instance, on web-sites. Nowhere there or in any UAR material (but of course I haven’t seen it all) can I find any endorsement of that statement from the Directive. Rather the contrary, because the purpose of UAR, and in particular of its Concordat project, is to make a secure and welcoming place in the modern UK for vivisection: to entrench it, in short. The primary aim of the Concordat, as twice stated in the Annual Report just published, is to “support confidence and trust in the life-sciences sector.” The progress which is aimed at, then, is not a change in scientific practice or in momentum towards animal-free research, but a change in public attitudes to the thing as it is.

The Concordat’s awards event and its annual report have both been fully featured in this blog on earlier occasions (see notes below). I don’t find any substantial differences this year, except in the scale of the public ‘engagement’ organised by its signatories: open days, virtual tours of laboratories, science fairs, links with schools, and so on. Always there has been one essential PR principle driving these things: to gain control of the public’s awareness. The principle is implied in the 2018 Report thus: “There is now more information about the use of animals in research in the public domain than ever and, crucially, it is owned and presented by more and more of the organisations who are responsible for funding, staffing and carrying out the research.”

“Owned and presented” most immediately by professionals in PR, of course, rather than by scientists themselves, who have other things to do. One signed-up university is quoted in the Report praising its own progress in this direction, and showing how it works: “Members of the marketing and communications team have been invited to tour facilities and to take pictures and prepare videos for dissemination to the public.” We saw one symptom of this way of managing things on Oxford University’s web-site earlier in the year, where a gross mis-statement can only have been allowed to get in and endure because the scientists themselves were not even reading it. Incidentally, that web-site is the first of the four examples of web-sites chosen in the Report“to illustrate good practice”. We’re told that “UAR periodically checks statements [the ones made by signatories on their web-sites] throughout the year to make sure they are active” (i.e. up to date), but it’s evidently looking for show rather than substance.

As habitually, this year’s Concordat Report acknowledges that being honest about “harms done to animals in research” is “an area of challenge” for most signatories, and they continue to shy away from it, in their texts and even more obviously in their pictures and videos. The Report itself makes a first very modest attempt to set an example in its own illustrations (a brain scan on rats, a pig lying on an operating table), though since there are no explanatory captions, these images are hardly more illuminating than the ubiquitous ‘library pictures’ which the report deprecates. And even the Concordat does not expect anyone to go public about the sort of lab-blunders which account for some of those Additional Statistics discussed above. For these we must turn to the Animals in Science Regulation Unit’s Annual Report 2017 (i.e. covering 2017).

ASRU’s report is an inclusive account of all its work during that year, including its licensing and inspection regime. The cases of ‘non-compliance’ which it had to discipline during the year are reviewed near the end, forty of them (compared to 45 last year, 55 in 2015: a promising sequence?). It’s a familiar record of failed communications, forgetfulness, under-staffing, lapsed attention, and occasionally real incompetence. The equivalent record for last year was treated in this blog at some length, and again there does not seem to have been any notable change. Mostly, of course, the victims of these errors were rodents: forgotten about at the week-end, overproduced in their thousands, cack-handedly half-killed. However, at least one possible contributor to that “other” category in the Additional Statistics (the 2% group) gets individual notice here:

A non-human primate . . . died when it became trapped between a restraint mechanism and a cage wall. Attempts by the Named Animal Care and Welfare Officer and other staff to resuscitate the animal were unsuccessful.

Here would indeed be an eloquent illustration to the relevant institution’s web-site. Even the brief text vividly evokes the unhappy scene.

But although one can learn a lot about laboratory life from the ASRU report – about the ordinary routines as well as the accidents – it shares with the Concordat’s more obviously partisan survey the premise that animal research should be made to work acceptably in its given (= its best possible) form. No “final goal” is mentioned or even hinted at in the introductory blessing to ASRU’s account given by the relevant Home Office minister, Baroness Williams. (Her official title, just so we know how near the front of her mind animal welfare must be, is Minister of State for Countering Extremism.) Baroness Williams places animal research firmly in its commercial context: “The UK’s life science strategy is based on a vision of how the UK may exploit its current strengths to support strong economic growth in this sector.” However, strict regulation is important as well, and the minister’s prose takes a sort of zig-zag course between these two purposes: “As a regulator, the Home Office has an important role in balancing the need to enable innovation and research in the life sciences whilst maintaining public trust [the Concordat’s aim, remember] through a strong framework that has the necessary checks and balances.” And so on.

Proponents of animal research like to talk about a ‘middle ground’ between the two extremes, which is where moderate and realistic persons can discuss and manage the practice. This is indeed where most of the texts discussed above would be supposed by their writers to be located. But there is no such ground: at least, not as they imagine it. For although abolition exists as a real possibility at one end, the other ‘extreme’, a free for all, cannot exist in the UK (or the EU) except as criminality. The real far limit in that direction is simply present practice, which should, as the “final goal” of the Directive makes clear, always be closing up towards abolition. All the texts reviewed here are concerned in one way or another to present animal research to the public. In so far as they fail to acknowledge and promote its character as a practice in required motion towards oblivion, they misrepresent its true legal status and help to protract its wrongs. Perhaps that’s their purpose. At any rate, I’ve saved you from the ordeal of reading them.

A few weeks ago, this blog highlighted a plainly false statement in Oxford University’s online account of animal research (titled ‘Research using animals: an overview’) and traced it to its source: namely, the web-site of the PR organisation called Understanding Animal Research. The statement claimed that the numbers of animals used for research in the UK had nearly halved over the last thirty years, whereas in fact the numbers have risen by about 5% since 1987. They really did go down during the rest of that century, but since then have been going briskly upwards, with occasional modest dips. Perhaps this mis-statement may not seem to matter much; I’ll say something about its significance later on. Meanwhile, here is its latter fate.

Since nothing came of outing it in the blog or, before that, of reporting it to the Public Affairs Office which controls the University’s web-site – making five months or so of conscious misrepresentation – we wrote a letter about it to the University’s independent house journal, the excellent Oxford Magazine. This produced a very civil e-mail from the PAO. There had been some doubt as to what data had been used to substantiate the claim, we were told, and it now seemed right to remove it.

So far so good, but a more general claim was allowed to remain, namely that the number of animals had been “dramatically reduced”. We pointed out that this meant the same thing, though less mathematically. Yes, the Office conceded that the claim “referenced old national figures” (2001 figures to be exact). That phrase too was therefore removed, and a larger revision made of the whole web-page.

So let’s re-visit this page. Some of the old favourites are certainly still there. As before, we’re told three times that “There is overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide that some research using animals is still essential for medical progress.” Perhaps this repetition is thought to have persuasive value, but it rather suggests that the page is pasted together out of contributions from various sources rather than through-composed, a point I’ll come back to. The statement itself is not evidenced, true as it probably is, nor is the more tendentious statement that “Most people believe that in order to achieve medical progress . . . animal use is justified.” In fact the whole page needs foot-noting. Why should we take it all on trust? Academics shouldn’t expect us to.

Then, as before, the point is made at least twice that this research doesn’t only serve humans: “animal research benefits animals too.” I’ve always felt that this is a dangerous justification, though one very frequently used. If it’s right, for instance, to make some dogs suffer for the benefit of other dogs, their equals in moral status (whatever we take that status to be), why isn’t it right to make the same rule for humans and their equals (i.e. each other)? But let’s put it the better way round: if it’s wrong to make humans suffer for each other, why isn’t it wrong in the case of the other animal species? Anyway the point is a disingenuous one: we know that these animal beneficiaries are not being helped for their own sakes. They’re mostly farm animals, whose routine dosing with medication is simply a commercial investment, or else they’re pet animals, likewise lent their value by humans. It’s the human valuation, in cash or affection, that does it.

And also still there on the ‘overview’ page, as part of the account of research with non-human primates, is the Escher-like statement, “At the end of its life the animal is humanely killed.” This formulation I used to think was intended as a sort of philosophical conundrum. Now I know it better as a bit of PR, a way of implying, without having to tell a lie, that the monkey has reached its natural term. But of course it is a lie, not just because the killing causes, instead of happily coinciding with, the end of the monkey’s life; the point is that it’s the monkey’s usefulness alive that has ended and prompted the killing, not its life.

Those are some of the familiar details which suggest that nothing essential has changed in the page, or in the habits of mind and practice which it represents. One of the most disturbing features of this ‘overview’ is its preoccupation with the treating of disease, as opposed to prevention or positive health. In fact these latter are not mentioned (except as vaccination). The page begins by stating that “Around half the diseases in the world have no treatment.” Accordingly, animal studies form one part of a “wide range of research techniques” whose aim is to find “cures, vaccines or treatments”. In the course of the text, some of these cures are listed, and their success evidenced. For instance, in the UK alone, “More than 50 million prescriptions are written annually for antibiotics.” (Can this be true?)

No doubt antibiotics, as well as many other such treatments, have been a very great blessing indeed to human health: which of us hasn’t profited from them? But the use of antibiotics – for humans and (notoriously) for animals – has illustrated the flaws in this adversarial model of health. Forty years ago, in the fine pioneering book The Moral Status of Animals (1977), Stephen Clark warned against this “arms race in which our ‘foes’ are always winning . . . Is it not time,” he asked, “to see what other attitudes there might be to the living world?” No doubt it’s unreasonable to look for these “other attitudes” in laboratories where vivisection is used, or in their promotional texts. Still, we can wish they were there. For unfortunately the whole practice of medicine has been conditioned by the militaristic world-view taken by those who service it with science.

Nor is there any suggestion in this ‘overview’ page that change is on the way for the animals. Despite the talk of reduction, replacement, etc., there is no expressed hope or expectation that the cages will ever be empty. In fact it’s noticeable that concessions to the ethical motive tend to appear in subordinate clauses of the type “While we are committed to reducing, replacing and refining animal research . . . “ or “While humans are used extensively in Oxford research . . . ”, the follow-up main clause showing that business must carry on as ever: for instance, “. . . there is overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide that some research using animals is still essential for medical progress.” The last paragraph of all is headed ‘How will humans benefit in future?’ The given answer is that new drugs and medical technologies will continue to be developed from (among other things) “the carefully regulated use of animals for research”. No end in sight, then.

It’s not possible to know how far this ‘overview’ really does represent the thinking in Oxford’s biomedical sciences. The disconcerting thing about that original mis-statement (to return there) is that any one of the scientists using animals at Oxford would have spotted its absurdity at once. That means that not only is this public account of Oxford University’s scientific practice not composed by the practitioners; they don’t even bother to read it. Even their Ethical Review Committee can’t have looked it over. I suppose that contributions have been canvassed from these people, who have come up with material of various kinds (including, no doubt, accurate numbers, but also resounding phrases like that one about the scientific consensus), and these have been patched together with prose connections and fixatives, and some material from such other sources as UAR, into the finished product which we see (but which they don’t feel the need to see). In fact, nobody has really said it or can take responsibility for it. It’s a PR collage, in which we may be seeing things really thought and done, but which cannot be relied upon at any particular point or as a whole.

This indeed has been the gift of the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research, of which so much has been said in this blog: we can now enjoy the illusion of knowing what’s going on.

The Home Office has now published statistics for the animal research done in Great Britain during 2017 (not the UK, because Northern Ireland publishes its own modest contribution to the scene separately).

Very little has changed since 2016 for these statistics to record (see the chart below), but there’s a notable innovation in the look of them. There are now three or four distinct colours, instead of the old black, white, and grey; the former tables and columns have been supplemented with graphs of zig-zagging lines in tonic blues; helpful comment and explanation appear in tinted text-boxes. In short the document has been designed to engage and even impress the reader, rather than merely to provide, with implicit apology, unwelcome information. This suggests the influence, perhaps even the direct advice, of Understanding Animal Research and its PR project, the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research. And UAR’s director, Wendy Jarrett, makes a comment on the statistics which reflects this new way of seeing them: not as a regretted cost, certainly not as a “necessary evil” (when was that phrase last used?), but as an index of achievement:

Animal research continues to play a vital part in the development of modern treatments and medicines. While the numbers of procedures may vary from year to year, we should be proud of the important contribution that the UK makes to scientific and medical advancement worldwide.

Here, anyway, is VERO’s summary of the numbers and species, alongside those of 2016, with some comments to follow:

Species

Number used in 2016

Number used in 2017

Mice

2,866,435

2,781,685

Fish

535,819

514,059

Rats

249,389

241,544

Domestic fowl

139,860

125,280

Sheep

48,095

47,499

Guinea Pigs

26,186

22,560

Horses

8,948

10,600

Rabbits

15,431

10,362

Dogs

4,932

2,496

Non-human primates

3,569

2,215

Other species

38,059

31,073

Total:

3,936,723

3,789,373

Direction of travel:

For the second year in a row, there has been a welcome fall in the total number of animals used, this time a fall of slightly less than 4%. Nothing can be deduced from this; as the Home Office puts it “any clear trend for recent years is as yet difficult to determine.” However, there is a very clear trend for the century so far: a rise of nearly 45% since 2001’s 2.62 million. Nor is the prospect good. If the UK were to leave the European Union without making terms to remain a partner in REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and restriction of Chemicals – a bad enough system already), it might have to create its own testing regime, duplicating what is done collaboratively in the rest of the EU. Or rather, it apparently would have to. A government minister truculently told a House of Lords committee earlier this month, when asked about this possible secession from REACH, “if that required animal testing, that would require animal testing.”

The term ‘procedure’:

Viewing the Home Office’s annual pageantry of numbers, so eloquent of orderly record-keeping and nothing if not factual, the dazzled reader must keep in mind that the basic unit, the regulated ‘procedure’, is itself an unknown quantity. A helpful hint to this effect is provided in one of those text-boxes, where ‘procedures’ in the plural is defined in the singular, a confusion of number which characterizes all official documents when dealing with this point, for very good reason.

Those horses, for instance. You’ll notice that they’re one of the few species in greater demand this last year. Mainly, it seems, they’re made to yield blood products for use in medical diagnosis and other scientific analysis. What: just the once each? Of course not: it’s really their career, and that would be the right term for what is asked of all these animals. Some animals may eventually retire, as perhaps the horses do: much more commonly, the end of their part in the project coincides with the end of their life. (This is something which the statistics ought to record, but in fact they say nothing about death.) Either way, the term ‘procedure’, with its suggestion of a single experience, is a misleading fiction, and therefore so are all these numbers.

Classifying the pain:

Actually the statistics do say something about death. Being found dead in your cage after a ‘procedure’ is one of the indicators for a ‘severe’ classification, we’re told. Others include needing help to eat and drink (to survive, in short). It may be that the statistics for each of the four main levels of suffering – sub-threshold, mild, moderate, severe – really are informative. They seem to change very little from year to year (the Home Office notices this), but I don’t know what that implies.

About 5% of procedures (not including GM breeding) are said to have imposed ‘severe’ suffering on the animals involved (95,025 of them) during 2017. So-called ‘regulatory testing’ (tests required by law in the EU or the UK, or beyond) takes a disproportionately high part in this category. Of its 505,000 or so procedures, 10% or more were considered severe. That’s no surprise, since this class of work includes toxicity-testing (195,000 procedures), and the Home Office statistics show that for this purpose the LD50 and LC50 tests – identifying the Lethal Dose or Lethal Concentration that kills half the animals – are still in use.

Numbers and individuals:

How much does anyone really learn from these numbers? No doubt they provide a rough knowledge of the scale of animal research, and which species and which purposes are tending upward and which down. But it is rough knowledge. Not just the basic term ‘procedure’ is opaque: the classifications of research are uninformative. Thus, one cat, of the 198 cats dealt with in 2017 (190 in 2016), suffered pain in the category ‘severe’. The purpose of the research in question was ‘animal diseases and disorders’. That’s all that there’s space to tell us. And how dependable even that much is may be deduced from the ‘Revisions’ to previous years’ statistics attached at the end. Here we find, for instance, that 5,930 sheep and 1700 horses which had appeared under ‘protection of the environment’ (itself a sinister enough category) were in fact engaged in ‘routine production – blood products’. It’s not so much that a mistake has been made – easily enough done in the stress of all this bureaucracy. More sobering is how little an outsider can make of the difference.

Animal protection groups quite reasonably tend to call the annual statistics ‘shocking’. I would say instead ‘stupefying’. Seeing these great phalanxes of animals moved around in their graphs, columns, tables, and other formations simply dulls the imagination. In fact, to re-iterate other posts in this blog (and the whole annual performance is after all a wretched re-iteration), these statistics are a variety of euphemism. Certainly they’re much better than secrecy, but they take the mind off the subject of individual suffering, which is the one thing that matters. Just occasionally, in the smaller numbers, momentary illuminations are offered as to what we’re really seeing: that one cat, for instance, needing help to eat or drink, suffering pains which “a person would find difficult to tolerate” (Home Office guidance on the ‘severe’ category), or perhaps being found mercifully dead in the cage.

By way of final re-iteration, I shall re-append the picture of the Oxford University macaque monkey: suggested caption, ‘Waiting for the End’.

Oxford University’s online introduction to animal research, headed ‘Research using animals: an overview’, takes the form of a questions and answer session. Your simple requests for guidance (“Why is animal research necessary?”, “Is it morally right to use animals in research?”, “Aren’t animals too different from humans to tell us anything useful?”, etc.) are answered with firm authority (“No.” starts the answer to that last question) but in relaxed, even incorrect, English (“they share a huge amount of similarities with humans.”).

Your fourteenth question (a slight whine imputed to it by this time) is this: “We may have used animals in the past to develop medical treatments, but are they really needed in the 21st century?” It receives the following answer: “Yes. New techniques have dramatically reduced the number of animals needed – the number has almost halved over the last 30 years – but there is overwhelming scientific consensus … etc.” No comparative figures, for the University or for the UK, are supplied to justify that astonishing claim between the dashes. However, it clearly refers to the nation as a whole, and of course the national numbers are readily available. They show that in the 29 years between 1987, when the counting system introduced by the 1986 Act came into use, and 2016, when the national statistics were last published, there has been an increase of about 5%. (If 1986 were taken as the reference date, the increase would be larger, but the two numbers are not properly comparable.) Not a steady increase, it’s true: there was a fall in the numbers till the year 2001, to about 2.6 million, then a steady rise to the 2016 number of 3.94 million. This history needs to be kept in mind during what follows.

Why should the University’s Animal Care and Ethical Review Committee (ACER), whose duty it is among other things to keep the University and the wider public informed on this subject, make such a wild and therefore discreditable claim about numbers? The answer, as I discovered by asking, is that it didn’t. Apparently ACER itself doesn’t compose the official public account of animal research at the University. The account is put together in the University’s Public Affairs Office. Presumably that’s why these animal research pages, which date from about 2011 and hardly alter except when the annual numbers change, nevertheless appear in the category ‘News and Events’. We’re dealing, as it turns out, not with the voice of authority but with PR.

So how did the Public Affairs Office come by this false claim? Unlike ACER, this is a department of the University which doesn’t willingly answer questions (its preference is evidently for what the Concordat on Openness calls “public-facing communication tools”: i.e. one-way traffic). Therefore I had to start with a guess. In its search for tonic material about animal research, where would the Public Affairs Office look? Surely it would go to its fellow-professionals at Understanding Animal Research. The UAR web-site is there for just such a purpose. “Click here to find everything you need to know about animal research”, it says – this particular encouragement specifically but rather puzzlingly directed at “scientists”. To journalists, the appeal is more frankly utilitarian: “the pages below give you quick access to our media centre, where you will find guidelines, quick facts, and links to other good information sources.” Quick facts: just what the Public Affairs Office would have been hoping for. So that’s the trail I followed.

But this is a very large web-site, branching out indeed into subordinate web-sites: one a sort of encyclopaedia of the subject (AnimalResearch.info), another a “global information service about animal rights extremism” (AnimalRightsExtremism.info), a third dealing with the industry’s Concordat on Openness. As the UAR’s name implies, the general premise of the whole site is that not disputation but knowledge is what brings us to a right attitude: that is, to approval of animal research as a necessary resource when other satisfactory means do not exist. This is what UAR habitually refers to as “the middle ground”, though what exactly it’s in the middle of is not clear: certainly there is a more radical position (in favour of abolition), but no position more reactionary than UAR’s (anything goes, for instance) is countenanced by UK law.

In general the tone of the web-site is merely positivistic, rather than defensive or strident. Here is UAR on the subject ‘Goat’, for instance. (That title itself, making the animal sound like a useful material, oil or aluminium perhaps, makes further comment unnecessary.) “Goats”, we’re told,

are gaining acceptance as an established model for biomedical research and surgical training . . . Moreover, a unique advantage to using livestock or companion animal species is that it also allows for ‘dual-purpose’ research: that is, research that not only benefits human health by greater understanding of biological processes, but can also advance animal agriculture so that we have a continued supply of abundant, safe, affordable, and high quality meat and dairy products.

Besides, the “friendly and docile nature of the goat” make it a particularly “desirable animal model for research and teaching programs”. At the end of this survey of the animal – a text whose spelling suggests that it comes from an American source, though none is cited – we’re told that “214 experimental procedures used goat [again] for research in 2016 in the UK.” 214? Wake up, UK: you’re missing opportunities!

Other animal species can be followed in an ‘A-Z of animals’. (I’m still looking for the source of that claim.) Ferrets, for instance: among their points of utility has apparently been the testing of the notorious drug thalidomide, which “induces birth defects in very few species”. That’s odd, because elsewhere we’re told that thalidomide would have shown up as harmful to unborn babies if only testing on animals had then been required, because “it had very similar effects in many species.” This latter version is perhaps the more reliable, since it appears in a section expressly devoted to correcting common misunderstandings, headed ‘Myths and Facts’.

Countering the ignorance and disingenuousness of its opponents is an essential part of UAR’s mission, and a certain amount of acerbity, jeering even, is thought legitimate here. (This is especially so in the pieces written by UAR’s Head of Policy and Media, Chris Magee. His account of Frances Power Cobbe was the subject of a post in VERO’s blog on 1 August 2017.) Accordingly, the ‘myths’ are presented adversarially, as ill-informed assertions, rather than as polite questions (“Research on animals is not relevant to people because animals are different from people”, rather than Oxford University’s “Aren’t animals too different from humans to tell us anything useful?”). But otherwise this feature on the UAR web-site does bear quite a close resemblance to the University page. And sure enough, when we reach myth number 11, “Animals don’t need to be used in research because there are alternatives”, the factual correction includes these sentences: “Scientists have strong ethical, economic and legal obligations to use animals in research only when necessary. Thus the number of research animals used annually in the UK has almost halved in the last 30 years.” Found it!

I don’t doubt that this was the source for the University’s statement, dismaying as it must be to see a university picking up and disseminating knowledge in this amateurish way. It unhappily illustrates, in fact, just how ‘myths’ (in this loose sense) work. As for UAR, their excuse for setting the myth going is that it was material left over from some earlier year, when it was quite properly posted as a fact. The last time such a claim could justly have been made was in the period 2001-4, when numbers were indeed about half what they had been in the UK’s worst vivisection years of the 1970s. 2004: that was well before UAR even existed under its present name. “Click here”, then, “to find everything you only need to think you know about animal research.”

UAR has promptly removed the claim from its web-site, but of course it’s the habit of myths to live on in spite of the evidence or even of express correction. At the time of writing, Oxford University continues to give the claim currency (though VERO first queried it in mid-April), and who can say where else it’s been taken up and promoted? I know that numbers aren’t the essence of what’s wrong with vivisection. They may even – as this blog has often said – help to obfuscate the matter. They certainly will if they’re not even the right ones.

The numerical details of Oxford University’s animal research in 2017 have now been made public. Here is a selection, showing the numbers for each species (with 2016 for comparison), and then the severity of the ‘procedures’ involved. A few comments follow the two tables.

Total number of experimental procedures, by species:

Species

Number in 2017

Number in 2016

Mice

229,640

200,157

Fishes

3,852

14,737

Rats

2,599

2,174

Junglefowl

21

291

Frogs

155

226

Guinea Pigs

80

81

Badgers

39

60

Pigs

5

0

Ferrets

29

29

Non-Human Primates

7

8

Rabbits

2

2

Total:

236,429

217,765

Severity of procedures by species (where moderate or above was recorded):

Species

Severe

Moderate

Mild

Sub-threshold

Non-recovery

Mice

2,085

38,177

65,063

121,487

2,828

Fishes

100

950

2,246

9,890

19

Rats

17

787

403

772

620

Ferrets

0

19

0

0

10

Non-Human Primates

0

7

0

0

2

The total number: 236,429 represents a rise of 8.5% over the previous year. It’s the largest number of research procedures recorded at the University since the new laboratory was opened in 2007, a year for which the number was 155,901. Almost certainly it’s the largest ever recorded at Oxford under the vivisection law of 1986, but numbers before 2007 aren’t obtainable.

Openness: Although the numbers are quite candidly published on the University’s web-site (as required by the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research, to which the University is a signatory), they are not exactly out in the open. They appear suddenly far down in the middle of the University’s standard account, ‘Research using animals: an overview’, itself a sub-division of the introductory page, ‘Animal Research’. By that point, the diligent reader will have been softened up with no less than three appearances of some variant of the statement “There is overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide that some research using animals is still essential for medical progress.” The idea, I suppose, is that he or she will be well prepared to regard the numbers, when they come, as the essential minimum.

Up or down: Accordingly there is no comment on the high-point which this year’s numbers represent, or indeed any comparison with any other year (VERO has added the comparison with 2016). On the contrary, the extended vindication of animal research in which they’re embedded includes the bewildering statement, “New techniques have dramatically reduced the number of animals needed – the number has almost halved over the last 30 years.” As I say, we don’t have Oxford University’s numbers before 2007, but in Great Britain as a whole, the number in 1987 was about 3.6 million. This number, so far from being “almost halved” since then, has in fact been exceeded in every year since 2010 (the number for 2016 was 3.94 million). But just in case we should interpret this rash assertion as conciliatory in spirit, it’s followed in the same sentence with yet a fourth appearance of the familiar refrain: “… but there is overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide that some research using animals is still essential for medical progress.”

Animals killed without experiments: There’s one valuable innovation this year: a number is provided for the animals bred and killed without being used in ‘procedures’. It’s a number which the Home Office doesn’t ask research institutions for, but ought to. Oxford’s total for the mice, rats, frogs, and zebrafishes which are bred in the University’s laboratories was 35,777.

Non-compliance and the 3Rs: The previous post in this blog was about the policing of the 1986 Act, and the 45 instances of non-compliance in 2016. Two of those instances took place in Oxford’s laboratories. This we learn from the annual report of the University’s Animal Care and Ethical Review Committee (published at the end of 2017), but not in enough detail to know which two they were. The report is a very general summary of the University’s ethical control of animal research, in particular its promotion of the 3Rs (replacement, reduction, refinement). The numbers given above don’t seem a very apt illustration of this activity, sincere as I’m sure it is. But then neither the ACER report, nor even the annual numbers, provide much insight into the attitudes, practices, or animal experiences which really characterize the laboratory scene at Oxford. Everything published about it is PR or PR-minded; the thing itself remains, for outsiders, hard or impossible to see.

Severity: As to the figures for ‘severity’ given above, and what these imply, see Note 4 in last year’s equivalent of this post here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/for-we-are-many/ In fact all of that post, and the previous year’s too (24 April 2016), remain disappointingly up to date. Very little has changed in the world of laboratory animals, least of all the commitment of Oxford University practitioners to its continuation. As ever, then, the rhesus macaque monkey looks out through the glass darkly, as we likewise look in.